A friend of mine complained to me once that what makes worship hard sometimes is the fact that there are what she calls “these fence post people” scattered here and there in the congregation. They are people who “stand out” in the crowd because she has had some kind of unpleasant encounter with them, and therefore they also tend to make her mind wander away from worship to nurse her wounds or feed her anger. 

I have had a few of those myself, and like my friend, have discovered that the beauty of sharing Communion at the end of our service each Sunday lies in the fact that I am required to step into a circle with those very people.  A small reminder of what reconciliation and community is really all about.

But today I am reflecting upon another kind of fence post presence from my church. This was an elderly couple, now gone Home, who sat always in the second row from the front in the middle. She often wore a floppy kind of red hat and bright pink jumper, and he donned a variety of colorful ties, and many times a red golf sweater. They became for me a symbol of the best a marriage can hope to be, this side of heaven.  

Every Sunday, there they perched, side-by-side, so comfortable and attentive to each other. When she knelt to pray on a small cushion, he came to her side to help her get back to her feet. Young and old in the congregation seemed to know them, and I remember many smiling fondly at the way they unpretentiously held hands or cared for one another in small, tender ways.

I also remember how, once, after a scripture reading from the Song of Solomon, the husband was wandering down the hallway near the nursery, asking people if they had seen his wife. One person within hearing of us who was a visitor asked, “I don’t know her. . . what does she look like?” To which the dear soul replied, grinning, “Great pomegranates!”

A short time later, this couple received news that their son, who lived out East, had been murdered. It was a gruesome, tragic story. We all missed them as they traveled East to bury their son. After two weeks, when they returned, they took in people’s kind words of condolence with a mixture of softness and dignity, and I could see that the husband was even more attentive than usual to his wife. I also remember that on the day they returned, I found myself standing beside her in the Communion circle in worship, and my heart beat faster as she served me the elements with her shaky hands and said, “The body broken. . .the blood shed.”

Perhaps a month later, I saw the husband sitting alone. His wife was going to be a scripture reader that morning, and she wanted to sit where she wouldn’t have to walk so far. He looked restless and amputated without her. She rose to give the New Testament reading, and her cracking, feeble voice caught us all spell-bound. When she finished, she shuffled to the back, so as to remain inconspicuous, and then eventually found her way back to her husband’s side for the emainder of the service. I watched him watch her, feeling I could almost read his mind, “Should I go help her?  No, she wouldn’t like that.” And when she settled in beside her beloved, he visibly sighed and relaxed; he was complete once again.

I am quite certain that they did not know what power they had, these two frail fenceposts, waiting on the border of heaven. They were a testimony to what marriage is at its very best—faithful, familiar attending to one another, a pair of grey shoelaces that have made the bows so many times it was second nature to them.